The two-day journey home had been one hell of a walk. The places where Mapplethorpe, the sorry excuse of a magnate, had bitten him had clotted and scabbed over; and, by the time he had found the familiar stretch of land that laid just beyond his mother's and Angier's markers, he swayed slightly as he came to a stop. His pale gray eyes seemed distant as he blinked, his jaw clenching after he had run his tongue down the side of his blood-covered maw. The red that had once been there had turned to brown, but the metallic tang still lingered on his tongue. Getting a whiff of the familiar scent of home, his head tilted back as his eyes rolled back in his head as he closed his eyes.

A slow exhale and he righted himself. He felt dizzy and he supposed the relief he felt was to blame. "You kill me, you kill yourself," Mapplethorpe's words had echoed in his ears, the ghostly whisper leaving with a gentle blowing of the evening breeze. Sköll swallowed the saliva that was pooling over his tongue. His eyes glossed over and he felt... nothing.

The silence pressed against his eardrums and he supposed now was a good time to call. He strode along the invisible markers, his lips lifting to expose the tips of his eye teeth. I have done Relic Lore a good service, he reminded himself, squaring his shoulders and puffing out his chest. @Elettra would be proud. He was, oh, so sure of it.

Breathing through both his nose and mouth he waved his tail before taking in a lungful of air and releasing it into a siren-like song, its pitch climbing up into an eerie soprano before sliding down to a deep tenor. The Prince of Willow Ridge had returned home... with pressing news to relay to his Leaders. Pantings a number of times, he brought his muzzle back down, allowing his tall, triangular ears to resume their skyward angle atop his head. He wanted to look as presentable as possible with his posture held at a decent height (neither imposing nor wholly suggestive of his willingness to be compliant), his tail held out with a neutral curve, and his head and neck held up so all or any who dared to greet him could see the wounds he had obtained and the old blood, another's misfortune, that coated his snout and throat.

Ahh, of course, they'd send the rabble... or, perhaps, the younger members of the pack - in this case, that Attaya boy - were just a bit quicker than both Elettra and Angier. As much as Sköll wanted to believe the former, to have that chance to rub his unspoken accomplishment Rowan's black-masked face, he held his tongue. One of his ears twitched but the simple wave in his tail did not convey the pleasure that came with meeting a member of his pack. A few clicks of his tongue was the only sound the young royal made in the seconds the passed since they first laid eyes on each other, but once it seemed that Rowan would not even dare to question what it was that the Archer had been through, Sköll's lips parted.

"I wasn't expecting you," he said, the tone of his words slick on his tongue. "Is my mother around? I'd very much like to speak to her-" something about Sköll's face hinted at his indifference toward Rowan, whether it was his slightly narrowed eyes or the rather nonchalant quirk of his brow before he turned away, surely, it might have accidentally given the other yearling a taste of what was. "-privately, if at all possible."

Another sense of accomplishment blossomed in his chest, warming his chilled core; obviously, the fallen monarch he had just disposed of, had been wrong. Everything about Sköll - his innate sense of morality, the inner workings of his mind, the psyche he had developed and nurtured since his cub days - had survived. The shock, on one hand, was probably the one singular factor that was throwing him off, making him seem... off. His next sentence slithered out from between his lips, his tone much too cold for the 'scout-in-training' whose mission was to retrieve the boy, "Any word of Deacon?"